Basketball Hands and Lime Hearts
by LyssaRosee
Summary: They can forget that what they are holding is your stupid heart and not the stupid basketballs that they palm carelessly and beat against any flat surface available./ Finchel 5 years after the last time they saw eachother.


A/N: I wrote the first part for a spoken word poetry thing a few months back and I just re-read it and it made me think of Finn, because the boy who I wrote it about makes me think of Finn. It got me thinking about how I really don't think Finchel is end game, and I also think that it definitely won't end well because boys with basketball hands are never careful enough with the hearts of short brunette girls who sing to them. Even fictional ones on a TV show. Luckily for the Rachel in my story things go a little bit better than they did for me.

Disclaimer: I am the owner of a shitty computer, a used car, two dogs, more clothes than my closet can hold, sixteen copies of The Catcher in The Rye, a growing collection of pineapple shaped cooking items, a giant owl shaped coffee mug named Ollie, a coffee maker named Bertha, and a few thousand dollars in student loans for a degree that requires another degree to make it useful to me. If you read this list you will see I own a lot of things and none of them are Glee.

Today I saw your hands in a grocery store

I saw them before I saw your face

I recognized them before a single freckle

I saw those hands I would recognize any place

The hands that have always been a mans hands

Even before you were a man

And they were too big hands on your too young body

Hands that didn't fit

So everything you reached for didn't fit

So when you reached for me I didn't fit

But the strength in a mans hands can confuse a woman

So being held in a mans hands can certainly blind a girl

Can certainly make her confuse a strong hand for a strong person

And definitely make her think that their size makes them perfect

For protecting precious things like her unscarred heart

But boys with big hands can have weak arms

And boys with big hands can have clumsy fingers

So boys with big hands can hurt you

They can drop you

They can forget that what they are holding

Is your stupid heart and not the stupid basketballs

That they palm carelessly and beat against any flat surface available

So today when I saw your too big hands reaching for heart sized fruit

I stopped

I Held my hand to my heart

To remind myself it was still beating despite any bruises you had left

With your too big hands

And your stupid, careless heart

* * *

><p>Being in Lima after over a year away feels like trying to step back into a pair of too small shoes. She is back in a bedroom that has not changed since she was fifteen, has to account for her whereabouts to her fathers, she can't have a drink and know that she can walk or catch a cab with relative ease, and thanks to a laundry issue she is even wearing a yellow sundress with little white daisies on it that she hasn't worn since she was seventeen years old. The dress doesn't fit the way it used to, it pulls at her twenty-three year old chest and hips in a way it didn't when she was seventeen, and this town never fit so she feels like she is bursting at the seams as she walks into the Super Wal-Mart to grab some things for a get together she planned for a few old friends. There aren't any Wal-Marts in New York City, and she thinks to herself as she eyes a sign claiming that both rat poison and bananas are on sale, that she is glad that her visits to this monstrosity are usually short and annual. So of course it is there, under the completely unflattering fluorescent lights in an ill-fitting juvenile dress with a basket full of cheesies and margarita mix, that she sees a painfully familiar hand reaching for a lemon right next to the limes she was pursuing.<p>

Rachel quickly snatches her hand back, knocking down a few limes, and tries to think of a plan of escape but just as she moves to turn away and make a break for the register when she feels a hand on her back. A hand so large it starts at the blade of her shoulder while its fingers curl just over the top in that space where the lips that belong to that hand used to leave feather light kisses. They were hands that clutched her shoulders, while the eyes that belonged to this hand searched for answers in her eyes that she just couldn't give at eighteen. She may be older, and calmer, and wiser, and more likely to swear than she was in high school but she is still a drama queen at heart, so she was honestly expecting some pretty hefty words when he spoke. Maybe a few words of anger or regret, maybe one of the drawn out monologues where he begs for a second (third, fourth, fifth) chance like she imagined when she was eighteen and spent her first two months away from home laying in her dorm room and imagining him knocking on her door.

"Miss I think you dropped your limes."

That was not what she expected. She closes her eyes for just a moment, lets herself feel the callouses that are different and the ones that are the same, remember all the other times that voice said exactly what she didn't expect both the good and the bad, and prepared to turn towards him. Before she even turns her head half way towards him he snatches his hand away and breathes her name, while he takes a step back.

"Hey Finn."

She doesn't know how she feels about the way his eyes go from glacial to foggy to neutral so quickly, or about the way his face finally settles into a familiar sheepish look and one of his basketball hands comes to rest on the back of his neck. She also doesn't know how she feel about the way they slip into the lame and impersonal pleasantries that are not too different from the ones she exchanged with Emma Pillsbury-Schuester the day before outside of the 7-11. She does take advantage of her mouths auto-pilot to think about the last time she saw Finn though.

She thinks of the way he was so incredibly angry at her, and the way he looked more like a man than ever before in his button up shirt and dress pants, standing outside of the town hall, watching her drive away. She thinks about what it meant that only in his anger could she see the man he was becoming, and about how she can still taste the sour flavor of guilt and nerves on her tongue just by looking at him. Her fingertips remember the way she clutched her door handle before she got out of her car dreading what she was going to do, her eyes can feel the weight of phantom circles from a night spent crying and panicking, her heart remembers that moment it knew that nothing that was right could possibly make her feel this terrible.

She thinks about that morning, how as she slipped on a cream colored sundress she cried and thought about how wrong it felt to be doing this alone without Kurt or her fathers and grandparents or any of the other gleeks, or . She had put on her star necklace and the ring she had been keeping on a long chain around her neck and noticed that the silver of her ring didn't really go with the necklace or the dress, and if she was on that train of thought it didn't really go on her. At all. Suddenly the ring that she had spent hours admiring in the privacy of her bedroom seemed too large and too tight and too not hers. It looked like something Quinn or Santana would love with its traditional shape (Quinn) and large size (Santana), but nothing like the round emerald ring of her grandmothers that she always hoped to wear. So she knew then what she had to do.

Leaving Finn outside that courthouse had been the hardest thing Rachel had ever done and the easiest. She knew that she was doing the right thing but God if it didn't tear a hole in her chest.

"So was New York worth it?"

Finns question throws her back to the present.

"It was never about New York Finn." She says slowly. "It was about me waking up on the day where I was supposed to feel the most sure of myself and having the only thing I was sure of be how wrong it all felt."

Finn sets his mouth into a thin line and she sees his ears darken and his fingers clench, and she is once again struck by the way anger ages him.

"It was about the fact that I got into NYADA and you weren't the first person I wanted to tell, or even the second or third. How much we loved one another was never just a part of my day but an all-consuming force that ate up most of my energy and I realized that real forever love doesn't wear you out, it gives you strength. So, yes Finn, while New York was the place I went when I left it was never the reason why." She finishes.

"Well you could have fooled me Rach." He snaps. "One minute I'm waiting for you outside the courthouse so we can get married, and the next you were shoving the ring into my hand, babbling on about how you couldn't do this without ? Then I hear from Kurt that you were taking off for New York two months early, with Quinn of all people."

Rachel remembers her frantic phone call to Quinn about needing to get out of Lima a little sooner than planned, and after the blonde calmed her down enough to get the full story how she quickly took charge of the situation. Quinn made arrangements with their parents for the two of them to drive to the city together a little ahead of schedule under the guise of Rachel needing to find appropriate housing and her needing a lift to Connecticut. Rachel had called Kurt a little less than twenty-four hours after she was supposed to marry Finn, when she and Quinn were just outside of Ohio, to fill him in and apologize. Kurt may be her best friend but he was Finns brother and her decisions had put him in an awkward spot as well as hurt somebody he loved. When she told him this he said that he loved her too and that she and Finn had hurt each other. He was the first one to realize this (including Rachel herself) and even now, nearly five years later, she is grateful to him for it.

"Finn I was barely eighteen years old and you made me feel like I was the only thing that could save you when I was barely strong enough to keep myself above water. You manipulated the fact that I thought the sun rose and set on you to convince me that secretly getting married, without anybody I loved knowing much less present, was romantic and not the act of a selfish boy clinging to something that made him feel special." Rachel said, ignoring the pounding in her chest that told her to turn and walk away. She had spent far too long feeling guilty for this, always taking all the blame, but now it was time for her to let it go and make Finn take his share of fault. "You expected me to give up my dreams for you, you weren't willing to compromise for even a second, all because you found out that an image of a man you never really knew wasn't completely true. Just because his last few months on earth were less than stellar you chose to completely dismiss the first thirty years of his life. And that's what you were always doing to everything Finn, putting it up on pedestals and acting like it was some personal vendetta against you when it fell. You did it with Quinn, you father, God, and I knew someday it would be me falling and instead of catching me you would watch me shatter and then rage at the pieces left behind." Rachel finished softly.

She took a moment to search his eyes watching as he processed everything she said and then she patted his arm and gently took the limes from his hand, noticing that he had squeezed them and damaged them. She placed them in her basket anyways, knowing that even though they were a bit bruised and misshapen they would still taste just fine.

* * *

><p>Soo initially I wrote this awkward long drawn out ending to this where Racel goes home and tells all her friends about it and we get to see what Glee guy has stolen her heart (although if you go look through my story list that would become fairly clear who that would be) but like I said it was awkward and I liked the last line enough that I thought it should be the last line. Also, despite the fact that in my mind Rachel does end up with a certain knight in shining hawk (always) it felt really forced here. Oh and btw I very rarely write extensive dialouge, because honestly I am not very good at it, so my apologies for the fact that the dialouge is more like .<p> 


End file.
